The ACT Hospice - Clare Holland House

Margaret was transferred on 30 July 2001 from Royal North Shore Hospital to the ACT' Hospice, pending assessment for and a bed at the rehabilitation ward in the Canberra Hospital.

The hospice is run by the Calvary Hospital for the ACT Government. The building is near new, the old building having been demolished to make way for the Museum of Australia. The new building is upstream, but still next to Lake Burley Griffin, to the east of Kings Ave Bridge, on the way to Duntroon and the airport.

The first impression on arrival is of wonderfully cheerful and thoughtful management and support for families in beautiful surroundings - and in a new building with new equipment, such as hospitals generally only have once in their lives! The word hospice is one that has seemed threatening, and it is, to the extent that a hospice is a place for palliative care, for the care and comfort of those for whom therapy is no longer appropriate or possible. As I write this on 1 August 2001, we still have one step of assessment in mid-August, to see if Margaret can have any further treatment (see my summary report for hospice staff here). But in the way this hospice works, with a lot of smiles, a lot of counselling, a lot of community volunteers to provide cheerful support and company, there is a real sense of the best of support through the hardest of times. And the food is good too!

31 July: This was Margaret's first time outdoors in over a month.
A lovely Canberra winter day, temperature maybe only 15, but still and warm in the sun.
The hospice in the background.
I have a sense, on 1 August, of Margaret doing a lot of reflecting.
The place is certainly conducive to reflection.

Here is the view from Margaret's room, looking across the lake to Kingston.

...and here is a view of Margaret's room from outdoors.

Steet drugs! - two cheerful nurses run out with a shot of morphine
for a gentleman enjoying the sun with a daughter and a granddaughter.

Here we find red riding hood watching black swans on the lake.
No wolf, but we missed the recent excitement of the fox who brazenly had swan lunch.

Perhaps exemplifying why we are so attached to Canberra,
a walk of 400 metres upstream from the hospice has us away from it all, along a bike path,
to the reaches of the Molonglo River, looking across to Dairy Flat.
The cow in the picture is but an exemplary cow, on a school farm.
The last local dairy farm has felt the squeeze and ceased to operate commercially.

Here are pictures added on 8 August

Margaret's sister Mary has been in to see Margaret most days

I hope that if I am ever so sick,
I can be as cheerful and as easy to care for as Margaret.

Margaret's bridesmaid of 1974, Andrea Hull, came to visit on 4 August

On 9 August, Margaret ceased to ride in the bath chair and took to a standard wheel chair -
Lorraine and Mary exemplify the cheery professional nursing care..

...and there are also many wonderful volunteers from the ACT Palliative Care Society
who drop in and see patients, and support the nursing work and
do such mundane but superlative things as put patients' clothes through the washer and dryer daily.
Julien French, recently retired from teaching English and history at Canberra Boys Grammar,
seems to be there at least three days a week.
Her gracious and positive manner matches that of her husband Scot,
orthodontist, who once said to Liz, calmly though with a slight pallour:
"would you please stop biting my finger."
Note in the picture that Margaret's expression can be explained
by the fact that she has taken the cup in her right hand, for the first time.
You can see the intensity of concentration required as the hand relearns basic tasks and strength.